An Explanation of The Wall

Broadcast in 1980

This interview seems to have been put together from a full conversation with
Roger Waters and Jim Ladd. They then mixed in some songs here and there and
edited out some rambling.

JL : Jim LaddRW : Roger Waters

JL: Good evening everbody. I'm Jim Ladd and tonight we begin part three of
our interview special of Pink Floyd. This is only the second time in Pink
Floyd's career that they have agreed to speak to national radio. The first was
when Interview brought you lead guitarist David Gilmour and for their second
only national radio special Interview is proud to introduce you to writer, bass
guitarist, and vocalist: Roger Waters. Interview will change it's structure
tonight and next week to bring you this special program with only one commercial
interruption. We're doing this so that we may present a verbal commentary of
Pink Floyd's epic concept album, The Wall, from beginning to end in four
segments -- one for each side of the ablum. Pink Floyd's album The Wall,
is, if you will, a conceptual novel set to music and tonight you will meet the
author -- Roger Waters.

RW : What we talk about now is going to be healpful for people when they're
listening to the album.

JL : What you will hear tonight is a song-by-song explanation of side's one
and two of Pink Floyd's album, The Wall. A work that took nearly ten
months to write and almost a year to record.

RW : Ten months until I had it in a state where I could play it to anyone. I
started in September and it was the next July I played it to the other guys in
the band -- a demo tape that I did at home. And then we started rehearsing it
and fiddled about with it and started really recording it properly in April.

JL : Alright. We're going to start now with the first song, side one called
'In the Flesh?' Which in listening to it and reading the lyrics is kind of like
an overture or a prelude to what's going to happen, right?

RW : That's exactly what it is, yeah.

JL : It almost appeared to me after the second time listening to it, that 'In
the Flesh?' was someone who this 'Wall' experience had already happened to and
he speaks first and we hear from him. Is that correct?

RW : Well spotted. That's exactly right. The piece on its simplest level is
about the situation of a rock concert and feeling alienated from an audience,
from the point of view of being on stage. Which is the point of view that the
character is expressing in that song.

[In the Flesh?]

RW : And then when we get to the end of that first tune, everything else is
then flashback.

JL : Now, at the end of this first tune, you hear this -- which sounds to me
like a military aircraft -- and begins this other analogy. The first to me is
this thing of an artist trying to relate to his public, but then there's also
this subtheme of war that keeps coming through.

RW : Yes. That's a personal thing for me, but also I think for a lot of my
generation 'cause I was born during the war. In fact, my father was killed in
the war. And I come from a generation that grew up out of the ashes of the
second world war. I didn't really want it to be that specific. It's just a kind
of feeling of being threatened by something. A parent saying to a child watch
out -- here it comes.

[The Thin Ice starts]

RW : It's supposed to be about how...I think it's about how parents start
inducing, almost inject, their own fears and worries into their children from a
very early age. Particularly in my case when they had just been through a world
war or something like that -- we all go through devestating experiences and we
tend to pass them onto our children when they are very young -- I suspect.

[The Thin Ice]

JL : From there we go to 'Another Brick In The Wall' and this is where the
father leaves home and the actual wall begins. 'Daddy's flown across the ocean /
Leaving just a memory / Snap shots in the family's album' So this is a real
personal song then if you told me that your father died in the war. This is
a....

RW : Yes it is for me, but it's also meant to be about any family really
where either parent goes away for whatever reason. Whether it's to go and fight
somebody or to go and work somewhere. In a way it's about rock stars leaving
home for a long time as well to go on tour and leaving their families behind.
And maybe coming back dead, or more dead than alive as has happened to some of
them.

[Another Brick In the Wall, Part I]

RW : It's not meant to be my autobiography. Obviously parts of it are drawn
from my own, but a lot of it is drawn in from what I have observed from other
people's lives as well. But the idea of going away to fight or going away to
perform -- being a similar kind of thing -- is meant to be there.

[The Happiest Days of Our Lives starts]

JL : In the next song, 'The Happiest Days of Our Lives', we hear an
uncompromising attack of school systems and of teachers who at a highly
vunerable period of Pink's life help to begin building a wall, that to some
extent surrounds all of us.

RW : Obviously not all teachers are what we have to fear. The school I was at
-- they were really like that. They were so fucked up that was they had to offer
-- was their own bitterness and cynicism. Some of them, I may say, were very
nice guys and understood what was going on.

JL : But this line here about when they get home 'Their fat and psycopathic
wives would thrash them within inches of their lives'?

RW : We actually, at the school I was at, had one guy who I would fantasize
that his wife beat him. Certainly she treated him like shit and he was a really
crushed person and he handed as much of that pain onto us as he could and he did
quite a good job of it. And it's funny how those guys, when you get those guys
at school, is they will always pick on the weakest kid as well. So the same kids
who are susceptible to bullying by other kids are also susceptible to bullying
by teachers as well. It's like smelling blood. They hang in on fear and start
hacking away -- particularly with the younger children.

JL : Would he do this in a physical way or mental torment?

RW : Mentally. Sarcasm. Sarcastic bastard.

[Happiest Days of Our Lives]

JL : Do you believe that most people would be better off without a formal
education -- the way formal education is today?

RW : As far as England is concerned, no I don't think they would be better
off without it. I mean you can't just take away what's there and leave a vacuum.
Most kids haven't been provided with the necessary tools to educate themselves.
You've got to help children to learn. I agree with you that most children will
be willing to learn if you help them to. Follow interests that they have, but
the machinery that you would need to give them that help can probably only be
derived from changing the existing system rather than wiping it all away and
saying that whole formal thing is of no use to anyone. Part of the reason that
this is in this piece is because at the moment there is a great resurgance in
England because educational standards are falling for all kinds of reasons.
Standards and literacy are falling, or so they say -- so some people say. And
there's a great resurgance 'let's make them sit still and keep quiet and learn
to read and write' school of thinking which I think is a terrible shame. But
it's happening because the inner cities in England are becoming more overcrowded
-- I'm sure it's the same here.

JL : It's exactly the same here. The literacy level is plummeting here and
it's caused great concern.

RW : But lots of people feel that that's because there's no discipline
anymore, which I think is nonsense.

[Another Brick In The Wall, Part II
starts]

JL : Now, the last song on side one. The song about mother here. Because
mother always means, especially in this country -- I mean, is it mother, God,
and apple pie. In what order do we run that down in?

RW : Chevrolets

JL : Chevrolets, mother, God, and apple pie. Anyway, she's up there somewhere
in the top three with a bullet in American culture. And always as the absolute
vestige of purity, and warmth, and security, and all of that. And here in this
song you approach mom in that way, but the very fact that she does all of this
stuff is what really is wrecking the child, correct?

RW : Yeah. Overprotection. If mothers area is often -- well I suppose some
mothers neglect their children, but I think an awful lot more of them
overprotect them. And go on trying to mother you for far too long. Don't get me
wrong -- that's not how I feel about my mother. I don't feel that that's exactly
what she did. In fact, I think that she gave me, in lots of ways, a reasonable
view of the world and what it was like -- or as reasonable as she could.
Nevertheless, I think that parents tend to indocrinate their children with their
own beliefs far too strongly. My mother was extremely left wing and I grew up
really believing that left wing politics was where it was at. But of course, all
the children of right wing parents all held opposite view. And it's very
difficult for parents to say to their children, 'well now, this is what I
believe, but I might well wrong.' Because they don't feel their wrong. They've
sorted it out and they feel they're right, but I think you can waste an aweful
lot of your life if you just adopt your parent's view of the world -- or if you
reject it completely as well. If you use their view either positively or
negatively to the exclusion of thinking it out for yourself, you can waste ten /
fifteen years [snaps fingers] like that.

[Mother starts]

JL : This thing about 'won't let any dirty girls get through.' (laughter) Did
your mom check out all your girl friends for you?

RW : No, she didn't actually -- well, yeah actually she did, yeah. I think
she was kind of old-fashioned enough to think that what would be really bad for
me would be to find a nice clean girl and get married -- and get hooked into
some relationship when I was too young. Which in fact, I did. But that's another
story. I can remember her specifically actually encouraging me to go out and
look for dirty girls.

JL : Really!

RW : Yeah.

JL : Oh, how great.

RW : Well, I'm not so sure. That was a bit more control. It's up to you. What
you want to do with women is your affair unless you want to seek somebody's
advice. You don't want somebody watching you. I didn't anyway. Especially not
your mother.

[Mother]

JL : We're back now with our interview with Pink Floyd and our guest Roger
Waters. As we begin side two of The Wall. Ok now. Side two of the album
begins with 'Goodbye Blue Sky.' And this is another song that relates to war and
bombings and this is where the child voices at the sky.

RW : That's like a resume of side one. It's saying that it dealt with the
roots, and the war, and the baby, and things, and the relationship with your
mother, and this is like a resume of it saying 'Ok, where do we go now?'.

[Goodbye Blue Sky]

JL : So this kind of caspulizes everything. And now we're moving on to, would
you say, adolescence.

RW : Yeah.

JL : Teenage years and so forth.

RW : Well, and beyond. It gets very difficult to follow now.

JL : Ok, we'll see what we can do.

RW : It moves very, very quickly now.

JL : The order is changed here because I have 'Empty Spaces' is next.

RW : Yes.

JL : Is that correct?

RW : It is on the album, yeah.

JL : But it's not on the lyrics.

RW : No, because we realized as we were mastering the thing that side two was
just too long and we had to get rid of something. And 'Empty Spaces' and another
cut that used to be on there called 'What Shall We Do Now' are the same tune. So
'Empty Spaces' was a reiteration, musically, of that tune towards that end of
the side and so we just axed 'What Shall We Do Now', but we've left the lyrics
on the back because they help tell the story.

JL : Could I ask you a favor then. Would you mind reciting that for us?

RW : Absolutely.

JL : We'll will be quiet and you just recite it for us.

RW : Ok, this is after 'Goodbye Blue Sky'. It's 'What shall we do to fill the
empty spaces / where waves of hunger gnaw / shall we set out across this sea of
faces / in search of more and more applause'. And then there's a list of things
to do. Which I'm quite glad isn't on the album now because it's rather banal.
When I heard it, when we'd finally recorded it, I didn't really like it very
much, but it does help to tell the story so I shall read it to you even though
I... 'Shall we buy a new guitar / shall we drive a more powerful car / shall we
work straight through the night / shall we get into fights / leave the lights on
/ drop bombs / do tours of the east / contract diseases / bury bones / break up
homes / send flowers by phone / take to drink / go to shrinks / give up meat /
rarely sleep / keep people as pets / train dogs / raise rats / fill the attic
with cash / bury treasure / store up leisure / but never relax at all / with our
backs to the wall'. So in a way it's a description of modern life.

JL : I can see now how that does fit into the story quite well. Although it
seems it would come later for some reason.

RW : Funny enough it used to come later and then we changed its space with
'Empty Spaces' I can't remember exactly why. It was so difficult in the later
stages of making this record to make any sense of it at all. Having lived with
it for so long -- having got so close to it, in so much detail -- it's then very
hard to take a broad view of it and make the right decisions about how best to
tell the story. I think it would have been in the right place there.

JL : But in 'Empty Spaces' which is still in here it seems to be the first
acceptance of this musician, or this artist, or this person goes...would you say
that's true for 'Empty Spaces'?

RW : The first time that he recognizes.

JL : Recognizes the need?

RW : Or that it's there. It's already been happening

[Empty Spaces -- Young Lust]

JL : Ok, 'Young Lust'. This is where I see the adolesence, the youth really
starting to feel frustrated. Searching for something to override this loneliness
or to blot it out. More noise, more diversion and we get into the dirty girls
and you finally get yourself a dirty girl.

RW : Yeah, well this is meant to be the first answer to that. And this is
where it gets really hooked into rock and roll, specifically. Occasionally
throughout our career we have done tunes that are a pastiche of something else
and this is one of them. And it is meant to just a pastiche of a, quote, rock
band.

JL : I want to ask you about these phone calls.

RW : I've been in that situation. My first wife got involved with another man
while I was on tour several years ago. The operator says 'I have a collect call
to Mrs.Floyd from Mr.Floyd. Will you accept the charges?' And it's a guy
answering, that's the point. We set that situation up. We phoned a guy in
England and said, 'OK, we're going to call you up and the operator will say
something like this to you and when she does, just hang up.' The operator was
wonderful. The way she immediately recognized what was going on....which I
really liked. And then he's obviously upset and then he takes this girl, just
anybody -- a groupie, back to his hotel room and she's wondering about.

[One of My Turns starts]

RW : The picture is that he's gone. He's just slumped. She keeps talking to
him and he doesn't want to be annoyed, but he then feels one of his turns coming
on and starts getting violent about the whole thing.

[One of My Turns]

JL : In 'Don't Leave Me Now', this seems to be one of his last contacts with
someone real outside of this wall that he has. Who is he talking to?

RW : He's talking to his old lady. 'Don't Leave Me Now' is a very general
song about men and women -- some men and some women. The song of the surprised
male who wonders why they finally leave after they've been treating each other
badly for a very long a period of time.

[Don't Leave Me Now]

JL : These bricks that are put in the wall...could they be interpreted as
defenses against all the stuff that's happened to him so far?

RW : Yes. You can say, on the simplest level, when something bad happens he
isolates himself a little bit more. ie. symbolically he adds another brick to
his wall.

JL : Now on the simplest level -- that's where I understand it -- so where is
it really at. Is that what you are implying here?

RW : When it's expressed using the symbols that I used in the songs like
that, on the symbolic level that's how it is. No, you interpret it however you
want to, but yeah the idea is as simple as that.

JL : That each and every time something happens to him, he adds another brick
so that won't happen again.

RW : Yeah, just to protect himself from anything or everything.

[Another Brick In The Wall, Part III]

JL : Now at the end of side two, and the end of the first album, it ends with
'Goodbye Cruel World'. Which at first listening you think 'well gee maybe that
should be at the end', but this is where, as I hear it, the wall is completed
and he is cut off, correct?

RW : That's right. In terms of how the way the thing should work as theathre
he is walled off symbolically, but he has also shut himself off in this room --
in this specific room somewhere in America.

[Goodbye Cruel World]

JL : In the stage show now, which we will at the end of this will go back and
explain, let's say that someone is watching the show and you're playing this
song. Is the wall completed except for the triangle or is it totally completed
at this point?

RW : Well, we haven't explained any of that about the show.

JL : We'll go back on this...just say for my own edification.

RW : Ok, while I'm singing 'Goodbye Cruel World' the idea of the show is to
do it just behind the plane of the wall and to backlight me very strongly, with
strong lights shining behind so that there's light coming out through the hole
that's there and as I'm sing the song to be filling in the last, say, ten
bricks. So that there's just one left that slots in at the end of the song.

JL : We must stop now, but we'll return next week with Roger Waters and pick
up with the second half of The Wall and the conclusion of our four part
interview special with Pink Floyd. I hope you join us then. I'm Jim Ladd.

JL : Good evening everybody. I'm Jim Ladd. Tonight we are very proud to
present part four of our exclusive national interview of Pink Floyd. Our guest
this week, as last week, is writer, bass guitarist, and vocalist: Roger Waters.
Last week we present the first half of Pink Floyd's amazing concept album The
Wall and this week you will hear the second half of the story and some
insights into the live stage performance of what became the most complex and
visually exciting concert ever presented on a Rock and Roll stage. The
performance of The Wall, which was filmed for a later release as a movie,
was in fact so complex that the phyisical requirements of production made it
literally impossible to take this concert on the road. And for that reason, Pink
Floyd presented The Wall in only two American cities: Los Angelas and New
York.

RW : Yeah, we looked at the logistics of the thing and the only way we could
even approach maybe breaking even was to just do two large centers of population
over here and one in Europe...London. We are doing LA, New York, and London. And
some of the central characters like the Mother and the School Master, and the
Wife, and the School Master's wife in fact, appear earlier in the piece as
inflatable puppets. They're big. They're 30, 40, or 50 feet tall. They're huge,
these puppets. They're wonderful. The only real reason for doing this live is in
order to inpose the discipline of making it work as a live show. Because it's
really a movie.

JL : We'll now pick up where we left off last week at the beginning of side
three of The Wall and we'll hear first what inspired this possibly Pink
Floyd's greatest work to date. Roger Waters.

RW : The starting point of this whole project was me feeling bad about being
on a big stage and feeling that there was an enourmous wall between me and the
audience. Albeit and invisible one, but one that I really felt was there. And
looking at the faces of the people that I could see in the first fifteen of
swaying heads, it looked as if they were experiencing it as well. It's like when
you are singing a very quiet song with an acoustic guitar on stage and there's
about ten thousand people are shouting, screaming, whistling...which happened a
lot on the Animals tour. There was always at least twenty people that I
could see whistling, and shouting, and screaming. They were trying, maybe, to
kind of be with me, but it doesn't help...'Wooo, Hey, Yeah, Get down'...you know
and you're trying to fucking sing these quiet little songs.

JL : Does it make you feel that your audience doesn't understand what you are
doing.

RW : Well, obviously they don't. The ones who are making the noise. The
problem is that you know that there are thousands of other people there who do
and who want to listen to it. If they were all like that then you could just
say, 'Ok, they're just a bunch of mindless pigs. Let's take their money and
run.' But you know that there are people out there who do want to listen to it,
and who are interested, and they do understand.

[Hey You starts]

RW : The starting point of this project was me thinking, 'Wouldn't it be
theatrical to do a show and to physically construct this wall that I feel
between me and them during the show. And to just cut the songs off to really
antagonize the audience and let them really find out for themselves how they
feel about that. So in the show, we do do that, but we don't leave it at that.
In terms of the structure of the piece, the wall gets finished at the end of
side two -- or in terms of the show -- about halfway through the show.

JL : I see. So 'Hey You' is next and he is now speaking to the audience from
behind the wall.

RW : Yes. The lyrics, in fact, work quite well. And as a piece of narrative
'Hey You' works quite well 'cause it's him, from a very isolated position,
pulling himself together and sort of trying to reestablish contact...but only
inside his own mind. And then it's the middle of the song is sung by a third
person who narrates the fact that he can't actually make contact -- 'The wall
was too high as you can see.'

[Hey You]

RW : He then becomes susceptible to the worms. And the worms are symbols of
negative forces within ourselves...and we decay. But the worms can only get at
us because there isn't any light or air in our lives...symbolically
speaking.

JL : Then it goes on to 'Is There Anybody Out There' which is the extreme
isolation and down loneliness. That's it. He's caught.

RW : Right.

JL : Anything else you want to say on that?

RW : Not really.

[Is There Anybody Out There]

JL : Now this one -- 'Nobody's Home'. This sounds a little like Randy Newman
to me. I don't konw if you are influence by him or not.

RW : Probably. I like his work certainly.

JL : So why don't you elaborate on this one for me. I like this one a
lot.

RW : 'Nobody Home' is really a song about him sitting alone in a room
reflecting upon his life and also reflection upon that fact that he can't even
make contact with his old lady.

JL : Got those swollen hand blues. Every once in a while you come right off
of Cosmic land into the bathroom. I just got to bust you on that one.

RW : I don't know what you think that's a reference to.

JL : Masturbation.

RW : No.

JL : No? Not at all?

RW : No, no, no, no (laughing).

JL : What's it a reference to?

RW : It's a reference to another song that comes later on called 'Comfortably
Numb' that's about fever. And it says in fact my hands felt just like two toy
balloons. But anyway, I like your's better. This song actually skips back tens
years from now to the late sixties. One line in it is specifically Syd Barrett.
The elastic bands on the shoes. That was him. He used to have elastic bands
around his boots 'cause the zippers were always breaking and you couldn't get
the buttons done up and... the Hendrix perm in those days, in the late sixties
... they were patterned. I didn't of course. But Syd did, Syd had a Hendrix perm
and everybody from Eric Clapton on.

JL : So again we can just sum this up by saying, someone who's harking back
to something more real while he's surrounded by all of this.

RW : Yeah, that's why he says 'I've got fading roots' at the end of it.

[Nobody Home]

JL : Ok. Now let's go on to 'Vera.' This is not the same woman that you refer
to in 'Don't Leave Me Now.' Is that right?

RW: No, no, no. Vera Lynn is...if you were English, you would know who Vera
Lynn was. Well, she's still alive. She still works in fact, but in the war she
was the force's sweetheart in England. All her songs are about the soldiers
going away. So in 'Nobody Home,' he skips back to 1968 if you like, and now he's
going all the way back to the war.

[Vera]

RW: The 'Vera' song finishes up saying "Does anybody else in here feel the
way I do." And then that how he feels. Bring the boys back.

[Bring the Boys Back Home]

JL: 'Comfortably Numb' is that last on side three.

RW: Yeah. In the original scenario for the making of the album there were
people banging on the door going 'Come on, it's time to go.' The idea is that
they come to get him to take him to the show and he's in no state, so they get a
doctor in so that they can actually get him standing up and wheel him out...and
wheel him on stage.

[Comfortably Numb]

JL: Are there a number of rock and roll doctors that way, in real life? He's
kind of a maniacle cat. I mean, he's really kind of evil, this doctor, in a
way.

RW: Yeah. I had one guy once who thought I'd got food poisioning for an upset
stomach. And he thought I had stomach cramps...he wasn't listening to me at all
either. In fact, I discovered later on that I had hepatitis. He gave me this
tranquilizer, it was in Philadelphia, and boy that was the longest two hours of
my life. Trying to do a show when you can hardly lift your arm. If he'd just
left me alone, the pain I could have handled. It was no sweat. I could hardly
lift my arms or move any of my limbs. God knows what he gave me, but it was some
very heavy muscle relaxant.

[Comfortably Numb Continues]

JL: We are now at the end of side three of The Wall and we'll take a
short break and in a moment we'll return with Roger Waters and the conclusion of
our interview of Pink Floyd's The Wall

JL: Welcome to the conclusion of our four part special interview of Pink
Floyd and side four of The Wall

[The Show Must Go On begins]

JL: After listening to the first three sides of this album and then you get
here and the first thing you hear is the Beach Boys. That really kind of turned
my head around.

RW: They agreed to do it. We asked them to do it. And they were going to do
it and then they went off and toured Japan or something instead. I think they
were quite into doing it. Mind you, they hadn't all seen all the stuff about the
'racialist' stuff that comes in some of the songs we asked them to sing. I don't
know how they would have responded to that. Because Bruce Johnston actually came
down and did some. He's credited on the sleeve in fact as one of the backing
singers. Well, I like that sound that they make, a lot, and it epitomizes a lot
of that sound.

[The Show Must Go On continues]

JL: Now 'In The Flesh' comes next, correct?

RW: Yeah.

JL: There is a substitution made. That Pink is supposed to come out, but he
doesn't, and they put a surrogate band in. Is that correct?

RW: Well, at the beginning of the show, we will be in disguise and at this
point we are as well.

JL: Ok, now why does this happen?

RW: It's the idea that we've been changed from the lovable old Pink Floyd
that we all know and love into our evil alter-egos.

JL: Because of this wall that has been built. And this alter-ego is the one
who is speaking about: 'there's a Jew' and 'there's one with spots.'

RW: Yeah. This is our nasty side coming out. We've now decayed.

[In The Flesh]

JL: We went from the Beach Boys to heavy metal. That was incredible. So this
one is 'Run Like Hell.'

RW: Actually it's sort of a disco tune isn't it. Would you say?

JL: Is this the warning to run from the worms?

RW: Yes. Interesting you should ask that. Originally it always was, but then
slowly I tried to move the emphasis away from that and it's just supposed to be
this kind of crazed rock and roll band doing another sort of Oom-Pah number.

[Run Like Hell]

JL: 'Waiting For The Worms.' This is a little more blatant. Facist. Things
come in with the putting on the black shirts and weeding out the weaklings and
the dead wood. I'm surprised you don't have anything here about genetic breeding
in the song.

RW: I'll make note of that and try and slip it in to some future work if
you'd like.

JL: Really...or you could just call the album back and mix something in
there, Roger. I don't think that would be too much of a problem.

RW: The thing that is really important about 'Waiting For The Worms,' mainly
as you've spotted it's just a kind of long rambling, ranting piece of nonsense,
is that it's beginning to wear off....in the story, whatever it is that the
doctor has given him is beginning to wear off and he's kind of flipping
backwards and forwards from ranting and raving to saying it starts off sitting
in a bunker.

[Waiting For The Worms]

RW: And then he keeps flipping into the other persona which is the raving,
facist persona that he has adopted. I could explain one thing and that is that
all that shouting, the bullhorn stuff is actually describing a march from a
place in south London. It's a heavily black populated area of south London where
the National Front is particularly active. And it describes a march from a place
called Brixton Town Hall and it just describes the roads and things and which
bridge they come over and where they're going. And they're going towards Hyde
Park Corner to have a rally in Hyde Park. And at the end of it, I don't know if
can hear, they're saying hammer. And that's another thing. On side four, the
audience who start off in between 'The Show Must Go On' and 'In The Flesh'...you
can hear them chanting Pink Floyd, but slowly that gets taken over by Hammer.
The idea was for a rock show to turn into a rally.

JL: These last few lines in 'Stop': "Because I have to know / Have I been
guilty all this time." Is Pink asking himself, 'Am I a contributor to this very
Hell that I have made for myself?'

RW: Yeah. Exactly that.

[Stop]

JL: And what's your judgement on that?

RW: Well...it all comes out in the next song.

JL: Which is 'The Trial.'

[The Trial begins]

JL: And here you bring back the characters of the school master, the wife,
the mother.

RW: And he has been obviously. We have been. We did do Aneheim stadium last
time where the first people in the audience are 120 yards away because they
won't let you on the infield. A dreadful place to do a rock show. The only
reason for doing it is money. The defense of doing huge gigs like that, where
nobody can really hear anything or see anything, is 'well gosh, we're so
popular...there are so many people who want to come see us that we have to do
these very large venues in order to accomadate them.' Which is a very nice
gently out, but the reason that we all do it is for the bucks. And don't let any
rock and roller tell you different because it ain't true. So, he decides that he
has, we have. All those big stadium gigs. As it's himself that's trying himself.
The worst thing that he thinks can happen to him is that he should expose
himself, and his fears, and his feelings, and anything to make himself
vunerable.

JL: Now wait a minute. You say that he's judging himself?

RW: Yeah. This is him hallucinating. This is him breaking down.

[The Trial]

JL: But the penalty...after all this that society has done to the guy, the
penalty is to tear the wall down and expose him as a real person to all these
other people behind the wall.

RW: The worst thing that he feels can happen to him is that he be exposed;
when in fact, it's the best thing.

JL: The last song on this epic work here is 'Outside the Wall.' It says here,
this last line, which I think may be the best line of the whole album: 'Banging
your heart against some made bugger's wall.' Now seems to be back outside of
this whole situation and now we have the artist or the "bleeding heart" who has
spent his whole life trying to get through all these walls that people set up.
Do you think that the artist is a person who is without walls? Are you saying
that you are a person who has survived through life without them?

JL: This ain't TV Roger. Don't do that to me.

RW: No, I can't say anything about the last song.

JL: Really. Too close?

RW: No, I like it and I....I like it as enigmatic. And I like that about it
and I wouldn't care to discuss it. I don't even really want to think about it
myself.

JL: Do you see yourself as someone who is constantly banging his heart, in a
literal sense, against...?

RW: I don't want to talk about this song.

JL: Really?

RW: Yeah!

JL: Ok. The Wall.

[Outside The Wall]

RW: I just hope people like it because I like it and it's rare to work on
something for a long time and you think....

JL: You're proud of it.

RW: Yeah.

JL: Thank You.

RW: You're welcome.

JL: Before saying goodnight, I would just like to say that this has been a
very special project for me and for all of us here at Interview. [Jim Ladd
thanks a bunch of people]